Smartini vs. Irma: The Last Word

Fran, May, and I made it back to Smartini, in the Key West Bight Marina, two days ago (Thursday, September 21), for our first look at her after Irma’s visit. Now that we’ve had a chance to look at the whole boat, the only things we found wrong that we didn’t already know about (from the pictures sent by a friend of a new acquaintance, shown in the previous Smartini vs. Irma update) were a broken radio antenna and a navigation light that came loose from its mount.

Broken VHF antenna. This is about 1″ diameter, made of fiberglass, and it had zip ties about 6″ away from the breaking point, and more about 18″ away, and they’re intact! No idea how it broke. The one on the other side of the boat, secured the same way, is perfect.The lower light is known as the steaming light. It’s white, and visible only from the front of the boat, and used only when underway. The two screws that fastened it to the pole either broke or came loose. Fortunately the wire didn’t break, so the worst part about repairing it will be me standing up on the highest point of the boat. It’s going to be hard to splice wire when both arms are wrapped around the radar unit in a death grip!

We’ll spend a few hours each day getting the boat put back together (i.e., getting everything back to its normal spot on the boat – seems like we moved everything to a safer place when we were preparing), and the rest of each day trying to be useful in the community.

Yesterday, eager to get started on that, we first walked around the neighborhood nearest the marina, part of what’s called Old Town. Lots of small homes, very close together, very old, with yards full of tropical trees and other vegetation. To our surprise, every downed tree and limb we could find had already been chainsawed and stacked in the street. So I just started driving around, while Fran stayed on the boat and searched the web for opportunities to help.

I ended up at one of the many disaster relief supplies distribution centers, a totally makeshift operation at Baby’s Coffee, at about Mile Marker 15 (about 10 miles north of Key West). I helped organize the literally tons of supplies that had been brought in (and that kept coming), and helped hand it out to the folks who just kept showing up. This was completely the effort of Gary, the owner of Baby’s – he got the word out, and people and stuff just started showing up. They had hot meals, cold drinks, and just about every kind of supply people needed. (By the way – for future reference – after about Day 3 of a disaster relief effort, they probably don’t need much more water! All three places we’ve helped with supplies in the past week have had way more water than they needed.) Today, someone (I think it’s Denny’s, the restaurant chain) is bringing in a 54′ mobile kitchen to Baby’s giant parking lot to feed people for the next two or three days. Then it will likely return to a distribution center for awhile, while Gary tries to get his coffee roasters back in gear. If you’re driving to or from Key West, stop at Baby’s at about MM15, and buy something!

Then Fran called with a delivery mission. A group called Healthy Start, whose mission is to help women with babies (sorry, can’t be any more specific than that – that’s all we gathered), had collected a storage unit full of diapers, wipes, and other baby supplies and needed a bunch of it taken to the Kirk of the Keys Presbyterian Church in Marathon. Most of the supplies had been collected in Aventure, near Fort Lauderdale, and delivered to Key West by the Aventura Police Department. How cool is that? So we did that delivery, and by the time we finished, it was almost 6:00, so we called it a day.

Well, we did one more thing to help the community: we went to the Waterfront Brewery for dinner. Since so much of the local economy is tourism, all the locals who depend on that are hurting right now. We’ll be doing our part every day for the foreseeable future, eating and drinking in the local establishments, and overtipping like mad.

It’s Saturday morning. After we finish our couple hours of Smartini “restoration”, we’ll probably go find another distribution center and see what they need, hoping to find someone whose yard still needs some trees and limbs cut. I still haven’t had a chance to fire up the new chainsaw I bought, and I’m itchin’!!!

Oh, by the way, May is incredibly happy to be home. If she never has to go for another car ride in her life, it’ll still be too soon!

May enjoying a well earned nap, on the pile of cushions that were stored in the guest cabin during Irma.